05.31.09
Posted in Camino, Software
at 3:03 pm
by Smokey
I’ve mentioned before some of the many things I like about TextWrangler, the free younger brother to Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit. One thing I didn’t mention before is the support for language modules (particularly codeless language modules, which in theory even I could write) for extending the types of files for which syntax coloring is supported. Bare Bones maintains a small list on its website, but slogging through Google you can find a plethora of others.
While working on some of the symbols generation/upload bugs, I discovered this language module from pudge.net for diff/patch files. I always sanity-check my diffs before I post them in bugs, and I often have to look at other peoples’ patches, and this language module has made those so much easier. Be sure to read the comment at the top of the .plist to help set up the colors.
This diff/patch module was a bit hard to find, and a couple of people have asked me about it since I first mentioned it, so I thought I’d write about it here to make it easier to find in the future. (I should also mention that for those of you who spend lots of time in BBEdit/TextWrangler with Mozilla .idl files, sheppy has a nice IDL language module available.)
It would be cool if BBEdit/TextWrangler could allow modules to use background colors and would treat some language modules as “overlays” so that you’d get native syntax coloring for the files in addition to marking which lines were added/removed, and I’m still looking for an AppleScript language module, but the pudge.net diff/patch module has been a big step up in usefulness. 
Update (2009-11-10): The pudge.net diff/patch module is now listed on the small list on the Bare Bones website!
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05.20.09
Posted in Camino
at 12:14 am
by Smokey
Camino nightly build users, please check to see if your nightly build is from 2009051815 or newer (to check, choose from the menu and look for the string starting with “2009”). If your build is older, please update to the latest nightly build!
On Monday afternoon we produced the first Camino build that had a complete set of Breakpad symbols, which means any Camino crashes submitted using that “afternoonly” will produce useful reports for us on crash-stats. Any nightly build older than 2009051815 will produce crash reports that are mostly useless and would only clog the crash-reporting server. 
We would appreciate it if all nightly build users update to a nightly that has complete symbols so that we can 1) have accurate crash reports and 2) make sure that crash reporting is working as we expect it to be before we release Camino 2.0 Beta 3. Not very many of you are crashing to begin with ( ), so every crash report counts! Thanks for your help.
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05.17.09
Posted in Camino
at 11:50 pm
by Smokey
I think I like this every-other-week format better; I have more time (and less pressure) to figure out when to write and when to do other things. On the flip side, it’s sometimes more difficult for me to remember what we did during the earlier week, and apparently my pageviews are down this year. 
I think I’ll take the quiet, thank you very much, and besides, Bonsai, Bugzilla, and meeting logs are my friends.
- Stuart Morgan continued to find himself up to his neck in Breakpad integration. He’s gone two rounds with the symbol generation code in order to allow us to generate good symbols for Core code linked into the Camino binary itself, and he also helped me write and debug a script to facilitate generating and uploading Mac OS X symbols. Stuart’s patch to allow viewing and deleting certificate exceptions finally landed, which was the last critical change needed to support the new Gecko 1.9.0 certificate model (and in so doing, removed from the tree the last live
objects.nib file dating from the Project Builder era).
- Sean Murphy posted a final patch for providing test pages for our phishing and malware protection, and his patch to improve the performance of tab dragging on Mac OS X 10.4 passed superreview. He continues working on pieces of the safe browsing feature, including the reminder bar that appears after a user ignores the warning about visiting a potentially unsafe website.
- Christopher Henderson started tackling smaller bugs with localization impact, polishing off several of them while awaiting reviews on his other bugs, including improved Cocoa localization for about:crashes. His patch to fix the behavior of the “Why is this site blocked?” button in our malware overlay also landed this week.
- Ilya Sherman returned to work on the Downloads window, filing or patching over a half-dozen bugs in this period. He improved keyboard support, adding ⌘A to select all downloads and ⌘↓ to open selected files. He also fixed a number of regressions related to the display of the Pause/Resume button and preserving selections in the window across sessions. When we last left Ilya, he was investigating how to make ⌥-clicking the window close button honor the warning preference just like ⌥⌘W does.
- Samuel Sidler has been tending to boxset, the latest of our tinderboxen to succumb to tinderbox-disease (in this case, an internal compiler error compiling
BrowserWindowController.mm).
- In between working with Stuart on Breakpad issues (including Mac OS X symbols and tinderbox-local build symbols archiving) and helping Sam diagnose boxset, I also spent some time working on website changes to support the forthcoming safe browsing feature.
In addition to all of our ongoing work, we decided this week to change the release schedule again; because Breakpad integration is almost finished but Tab Overview (née Tabsposé) and safe browsing, which have large localization impact, aren’t, we are going to release Camino 2.0 Beta 3 once we have the Breakpad work complete. We’ll add a new Beta 4 to the picture that will serve as both the feature freeze and the localization freeze. I’m excited about getting modern crash reporting in the hands of more of our users—and especially about having one less reason to visit the dated Talkback reports! Stay tuned for more, and look for Camino 2.0 Beta 3 in the next couple of weeks.
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05.13.09
Posted in Camino
at 7:48 pm
by Smokey
As part of Camino joining the world of modern crash reporting systems, I’ve recently taken over from Ted Mielczarek in the ad hoc uploading of symbols from OS libraries for Mac OS X. As of this moment, we have symbols for Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Mac OS X 10.5.61 on crash-stats, and any new crash reports from applications running on those versions of Mac OS X should now have the most common system libraries and frameworks symbolized.
Thanks to Ted and justdave for making it happen, and special thanks to Stuart Morgan for putting up with my typos and weak scripting fu throughout the process of getting me set up to generate and upload the symbols!
1 Apple decided this week was a good time to release a number of OS updates, so the 10.5.7 symbols should be available once I have time to update, likely over the weekend. ↩
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05.02.09
Posted in Camino
at 11:23 pm
by Smokey
We’ve kept busy again the past two weeks!
- Stuart Morgan has continued to run with the baton on our Breakpad integration, both hooking up more pieces of the puzzle in Camino itself and getting necessary changes made upstream. In the past two weeks he has landed Breakpad changes to better support the Socorro crash processing system, to provide the crash reporter application a sane name, and to support dynamic selection of what crash reporter fields are visible (including moving localization entirely into
.strings files). On the Camino side, Stuart landed code to generate symbols when building nightlies and to upload them afterwards, including inventing some new tinderbox integration glue. As of today, Camino 2.0b3pre nightly builds are generating symbols and uploading them to the symbol server, and crash reports are being reported to crash-stats. The only major piece that remains before the end-to-end system is working for us is (hopefully) a server configuration issue that tells crash-stats to look at the symbol files when processing Camino crash reports.
- During the past two weeks, Sean Murphy continued working on pieces of our anti-phishing feature, moving it closer to completion.
- Christopher Henderson’s patch to add “Allow Flash From This Site” to the context menu for Flashblocked items bounced in and out of the tree due to unfortunate bugs in the toolchain that ships with Xcode 2.x. Once Sam is free again, we should be able to get the logs we need to figure out the last remaining issue and enable the feature once again. In addition to work on that patch, Christopher wrote additional code for displaying UTF-8 URLs in the Bookmarks Manager, created a patch to fix the behavior of the “Why is this site blocked?” button on the anti-phishing overlay, and started a review of our sample preference pane code.
- Ilya Sherman worked on several downloads-related bugs, including ones to add a keyboard shortcut to open files from the Downloads window and to allow dragging multiple files from the window. In addition, he also fixed a regression that caused the “Pause” button to be disabled at all times.
- Over the past few weeks, I again performed small tasks to facilitate others’ work on our larger projects. Once Stuart had all of the Breakpad symbol upload changes ready, I got to flip the switch to turn uploading on and report on the tinderbox response. I also created a proof-of-concept patch to allow us to easily re-upload symbols in case of a failure (something that happened recently with Talkback symbols for Camino 1.6.7). On the client side, I renamed the crash reporter using the (much saner) new mechanism that Stuart implemented upstream, and I also got about:crashes working in Camino.
It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for us, particularly in the crash reporting department. Of course, we hope you never see our crash reporting UI, but when you do, the resulting reports will be far more useful to us than the old Talkback-based reports are. In the weeks ahead, we hope to continue making progress on other features that will be more visible in your daily use!
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